Programme

Day 1: Site (and Studio) “Draw what you see, know what you see, draw what you know you see.“ Ruskin

We will spend the first day investigating routes through the rich and diverse area between the AA and the Thames. Using a broad range of ways to document what we find we will saturate our sense of the area’s history, with its unique materials, functions, spaces, hierarchies and rhythms. Capturing experience will be everything.

Day 2: Studio (and site)

Focus on idea generation and ways of extracting and synthesizing stories from the site area. We will examine how artists and designers construct architectural narratives in different media while demonstrating concerns for materiality, history, functionality and mood. This process will begin to tell us what elements of the site are important for communicating our emergent ideas. The second half of this day will be devoted to roughing out a range of our responses to our site journeys. Emphasis will be given to recording views in a variety of drawing and sketching techniques including: orthographic projections/isometric/axonometric, 1,2,3 point perspective, observational drawing. We will also have impromptu instruction in understanding and use of tone, light and shade, layering and tracing.

Day 3-5: Studio: Ideation and Narrative

Based on their engagement with the site area, students will pitch an idea for a narrative that may pertain to the past, present, future or multiple times. Several groups will be formed that will identify which idea(s) to build on in collaboration. We will discuss how the emergent work should be produced, planning what parts must be created as simple models, drawings, or actually done in situ. Groups of 3 students will be formed and the creative work will be broken down into achievable parts.

Days 6-8: Synthesis

We now begin to concentrate on realizing representational intention. Workshops will move us beyond literal–mindedness; this will be a period of intense production and investigation of the transformational power of drawing, particularly the opportunities it gives to create across scales, to cross the boundaries between the actual and the visionary. All studio and site work will be supplemented with skills workshops and on–going group tutorials.

Days 9 –10: Final Drawings

Large scale group and individual drawings will be created in the studio that are a culmination of the previous 8 days work, using digital and analogue compositing techniques to construct our architectures. The final day culminates in a studio review with invited critics.